Blog Posts in June 2016

Does It Make Sense to Build Your Own Networking Solutions?

One of my readers was listening to the Snabb Switch podcast and started wondering “whether it’s possible to leverage and adopt these bleeding-edge technologies without a substantial staff of savvy programmers?

Short answer: No. Someone has to do the heavy lifting, regardless of whether you have programmers on-site, outsource the work to contractors, or pay vendors to do it.

read more see 10 comments

Build Your Own Service Provider Gear on Software Gone Wild

A few days after I published a blog post arguing that most service providers cannot possibly copy Google’s ideas Giacomo Bernardi wrote a comment saying “well, we managed to build our own gear.

Initially I thought they built their own Linux distribution on top of x86 server, but what Giacomo Bernardi described in Episode 59 of Software Gone Wild goes way beyond that:

read more see 4 comments

Optimize Your Data Center: Reduce the Number of Uplinks

Remember our journey toward two-switch data center? So far we:

Time for the next step: read a recent design guide from your favorite hypervisor vendor and reduce the number of server uplinks to two.

Not good enough? Building a bigger data center? There’s exactly one seat left in the Building Next Generation Data Center online course.

add comment

Where Is the Explosion of Overlay Virtual Networks

Three years ago I was speaking with one of the attendees of my overlay virtual networking workshop @ Interop Las Vegas and he asked me how soon I thought the overlay virtual networking technologies would be accepted in the enterprise networks.

My response: “you might be surprised at the speed of the uptake.” Turns out, I was wrong (again). Today I’m surprised at the lack of that speed.

read more see 7 comments

Big Chain Deep Dive on Software Gone Wild

A while ago Big Switch Networks engineers realized there’s a cool use case for their tap aggregation application (Big Tap Monitoring Fabric) – an intelligent patch panel traffic steering solution used as security tool chaining infrastructure in DMZ… and thus the Big Chain was born.

Curious how their solution works? Listen to Episode 58 of Software Gone Wild with Andy Shaw and Sandip Shah.

add comment

Directed ARP and ICMP Redirects

One of my readers sent me this question:

When I did my ***redacted*** I encountered a question about Directed ARP. The RFC (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1433) is in the "experimental" stage, and I found it really weird from ***** to include such a hidden gem in the ***redacted***.

Directed ARP is clearly one of those weird things that people were trying out in the early days of networking when packet forwarding and bandwidth were still expensive (read the RFC for more details), but I kept wondering “what exactly is going on when a host receives an ICMP redirect?” Time for a hands-on test.

read more see 11 comments

Is OVSDB a Control- or Management-Plane Protocol?

A while ago I discussed whether XMPP is a control- or management-plane protocol (spoiler: it depends). How about OVSDB? Here’s another question from one of my readers:

Why is Openflow considered as control plane protocol and OVSDB management plane protocol if both are relying on SDN controller? Is it because Openflow can directly modify the dataplane?

SDN controllers can use control- or management-plane protocols to get the job done.

read more see 2 comments

Virtual Firewalls: Featured Webinar in June 2016

Virtual Firewalls is the featured webinar in June 2016, and the featured videos (marked with a star) explain the difference between virtual contexts and virtual appliances, and the virtual firewalls taxonomy.

To view the videos, log into my.ipspace.net (or enroll into the trial subscription if you don’t have an account yet), select the webinar from the first page, and watch the videos marked with star.

If you're a trial subscriber and would like to get access to the whole webinar, use this month's featured webinar discount (and keep in mind that every purchase brings you closer to the full subscription).

add comment

SDN as an Abstraction Layer

During the Introduction to SDN webinar I covered numerous potential definitions:

I find all of these definitions too narrow or even misleading. However, the “SDN is a layer of abstraction” one is not too bad (see also RFC 1925 section 2.6a).

see 1 comments

Using Macvlan and Ipvlan with Docker on Software Gone Wild

A few weeks after I published Docker Networking podcast, Brent Salisbury sent me an email saying “hey, we have experimental Macvlan and Ipvlan support for Docker” – a great topic for another podcast.

It took a while to get the stars aligned, but finally we got Brent, Madhu Venugopal, John Willis and Nick Buraglio on the same Skype call resulting in Episode 57 of Software Gone Wild.

see 1 comments
Sidebar